![]() in the 1960s and saw great international success. As they garnered a wider audience, songs like their Gershwin cover became increasingly popular in the U.S. bands, The Zombies helped define 1960s rock, and Gershwin’s music further cemented its place in the ever-evolving popular music sphere. Thirty years after The Zombies’ cover, another artist took a new approach to “Summertime.” Ska-punk band Sublime, a ’90s group from Long Beach, California who drew heavily on a wide variety of genres, including hip hop, punk rock, and reggae, looked back to the 1960s for inspiration. Sublime took a liking to an improvised, bossa nova rendition of Gershwin’s aria on jazz flutist Herbie Mann’s 1961 live album, Herbie Mann at the Village Gate. They sampled Mann’s track, mixed the flute melody with drums, and then recorded half-sung, half-rapped vocals over the track. Featuring elements such as record scratches and vocal growls, the song is unmistakably modern in its experimentation and use of technology. The two songs are sequenced at the very front of the album, an order that was originally intended by Nowell before his death.Though the lyrics differ from librettist DuBose Heyward’s original text, the first line of the aria is kept relatively intact, as Sublime sings “Doin’ time, and the living’s easy” to the same melody heard in Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Sublime titled their Mann-inspired work “Doin’ Time,” which tells the story of a cheating lover whose treatment makes the singer feel imprisoned (“doin’ time”). For the tenth anniversary deluxe edition of the album, however, Nowell’s original “Doin’ Time” line is reinstated, along with the cover of ‘Trenchtown Rock’. The final version of ‘Doin’ Time’ features Happoldt singing the opening “summertime” line while Nowell takes on the rest of the song. With the song being cleared at the last minute, ‘Doin’ Time’ was sequenced onto the end of the album in order to make the scheduled July 30th release date. The other band members insisted that ‘Doin’ Time’ be featured on the final album, so close friend Michael Happoldt recorded the replacement lead vocal line instead. This became a problem, considering how Nowell had recently died and would subsequently be unable to record the new line. It was only after Nowell died that the Gershwin estate agreed to clear the song, with one caveat: the “Doin’ Time” phrase had to be replaced with “Summertime” to more accurately reflect the interpolation. A similar block caused the band to drop their cover of Bob Marley’s ‘Trenchtown Rock’, and so Nowell sequenced the album without ‘Doin’ Time’ as well. ![]() Then came the call that the band did not get permission to use the George Gershwin sample at the centre of ‘Doin’ Time’. ![]() That required quite a bit of finagling from MCA Records in order to get the various songwriting royalties correctly doled out, but as they approached the end of the recording process, it looked as though Sublime would make it to record shelves in one piece. Of the album’s 17 tracks, only a few are completely original – most songs feature either samples or interpolations of other tracks in them. That process lead to some difficulties getting the album finished.
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